The Healer
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- 22,99 lei
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- 22,99 lei
Publisher Description
A tale of mystery and healing from the Canadian forests, where Nature can be nasty and men can easily go mad.
We’re in the Canadian uplands, a landscape of lakes and forests, cabins and canoes, hunters and hunted. The Healer is a young teenage girl with a gift she finds hard to bear: she seems able to heal the sick, to drive out foul spirits. Her father is a brutal man: strong, tempestuous and violent, he finds it hard to accommodate his daughter’s abilities in the way she would wish. A journalist, our principal narrator, comes between them, sent by his magazine to secure a story.
Entranced by the girl and the emptiness of the land, he buys from a persuasive realtor the derelict lakeside cabin which becomes the centre of the action, as all three main characters swirl into a vortex of vengeance and violence – violence reflected in a landscape of storms and floods of terrifying power. Hollingshead proves himself a writer who knows the lethal force latent in the natural world. And that man is an animal too.
Reviews
From the reviews for The Healer:
‘A mad-tongued Gothic tale, a blend of high drama and sly, dark marvels’
New York Times
‘There are some wonderfully poetic and resonant images in this novel; the descriptions of the Canadian landscape are incandescent and some of the set-pieces both hilarious and disturbing.’
Francis Gilbert, The Times
About the author
Greg hollingshead is the author of one previous novel, Spin Dry, and three sets of stories, Famous Players, White Buick and The Roaring Girl. Only The Roaring Girl was published outside Canada. He teaches at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Canadian author Hollingshead's introspective American debut novel has all the rueful dysfunctionality of his well-received short story collection The Roaring Girl (which won the 1995 Governor General's Award for Fiction), but less of its irony and little of its humor. The title character, Caroline Troyer, is a young woman from rural Canada whose inexplicable curative powers have attracted the notice of 32-year-old journalist Timothy Wakelin, who comes to the remote mining town of Grant, Ontario, to meet her. Wakelin is not on the track of a tabloid story so much as in pursuit of some soul-searching after the death of his wife. Troyer, paradoxically, is a faith healer without faith, close to despair herself underneath her rural stoicism. Her abusive, worldly father, Ross, gradually tips over the edge of sanity, complicating the burgeoning but uneasy relationship between his daughter and Wakelin. Overall, Hollingshead's talent for characterization and low-key drama gets stretched too thin by a meandering plot and self-conscious writing. Wakelin's and, later, Caroline's refuge in an isolated farmhouse is the scene of much ruminative tedium as Hollingshead indulges their melancholia. His prose here and elsewhere gets clogged with metaphors and metaphysics that impede the narrative flow. Ultimately, Hollingshead fails to resolve his characters' emotional crises, as the action peters out with an anticlimactic confrontation with Caroline's "devil daddy" in the wilderness.
